01 September 2005

Programming pages.

Because I have a Macintosh, I tend to use Safari as a web browser. It’s a handy little program, and locks up a lot less than Microsoft Internet Explorer. (I don’t know what it is with those Microsoft people and their lock-ups. Supposedly they’re interested in selling stuff to Apple’s consumers, and they own a nice batch of Apple stock, but sometimes I suspect they only want Apple around so they can have a convenient place to steal ideas from.)

The catch with using Safari all the time is that sometimes I forget that the rest of the planet uses Internet Explorer. (Except for the small batch of die-hards that use other browsers that don’t lock up so often.) So when I program a page to do neat things, I check to see if it works in Safari. If it does, I’m fine with it. Not that I’m deliberately trying to screw over Windows users or Internet Explorer users; I just wasn’t thinking about them.

So, after getting frustrated with my own pages on someone else’s computer, I apologize. I’ll do what I can to clean up the code.

Bear in mind that Microsoft has its own bastardized versions of the code I use. Everyone else sticks to the standards—Netscape’s version of JavaScript and the international conventions of HTML and stylesheets—yet Microsoft feels free to tweak these standards for their convenience because, after all, they have a near-monopoly on the world’s computers.

And Microsoft does make great software; but like I said before, I wish it wouldn’t lock up so often. I’ve been too spoiled by Macintosh OS X.